Basic Judaism spoken here.

What’s “Yasher Koach”?

You’ve just said a Torah blessing, or given a drash [short speech about Torah] or helped with something around the synagogue. Suddenly people are sticking their hands out to you for a handshake and saying “Ya-sher KO-ach!” with great enthusiasm. What the heck?

Don’t worry, you haven’t done anything wrong; just the reverse, they’re congratulating you on a job well done. “Yasher koach!” is an idiom meaning, “Good job!” and it carries with it the hope that this mitzvah will give you the strength to carry on to future mitzvot. Think of it as a cheer, or a thumbs’ up.

It has a lot of variant pronunciations: YA-sher KO-ach, Y’Sh’KOICH, YA-sher-KOYch, and so on.

The polite thing to say in return is “Baruch Tihiye” (Ba-rooch tih-hee-yeh). That means “blessed you will be,” which might translate colloquially as “Back atcha!”

(Todah rabbah, thank you very much, to Daniel J. Lieberman for correcting my error in an earlier version of this post. Thanks, too, to my colleagues in the CCAR who consulted on the issue. Torah is always, always a community project.)

Thank you for your efforts. I have a Catholic friend who’s very ill and has done good things his whole life.
When I wished him Yasher koach, and told him that in his case it meant to have strength to do other good things, he was very touched.

I would like to thank you for the efforts you’ve put in penning
this site. I am hoping to check out the same high-grade blog posts from you later on as well.
In truth, your creative writing abilities has motivated me to get my own, personal site now 😉

I think you have your pronunciations incorrect. For a man, the correct pronunciation should be ye-yasher kochacha and for a woman it should be ye-yasher kocheich. The subject of the sentence is koach (which is a masculine word), not the person you are talking to.

Thank you Coffee Shop Rabbi for explaining this. While l know some Hebrew phrases, and guessed what this one meant, no one explained it to me. Yes, I am on the Board of my synagogue, and write about Jewish spirituality. But that doesn’t mean I know Hebrew. If I don’t know what it means, how much more so for the average congregant, and even how much more so for the 70% of Jews who are not members of a synagogue or the 49% who do not know the Hebrew Alphabet.

I mentioned this before, but I think you might want to correct the transliteration of the feminine form. While many people to say “yasher koach” to men as abbreviation of the more correct “ye-yasher kochacha,” “tashiri kocheich” is just plain ungrammatical. The second-person feminine form of the word “yeyasher” would be “tiyasheri.” But in any case, in this sentence, the subject of is “koach” which is a masculine noun. Your (feminine) koach is (as you said correctly) kocheich but the word itself is still masculine and should be referred to in the third-person, not the second. “Yeyasher kocheich” is the correct response to a woman.

I took this to several colleagues, and as sometimes happens, a friendly argument erupted. While several agreed that “yeyashar koheich” was grammatically correct and the other was incorrect, there were some variant opinions about feminine forms and a third group of opinions suggesting that “yasher koach” really should be fine for all.

I decided that given the purpose of this blog (basic instruction for beginners), I would edit out the error and drop the whole discussion of the feminine.